Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 20

Liverpool are better at replacing legends but Arteta is at last shrugging off the past | Jonathan Wilson

Great predecessor syndrome has not stood in Arne Slot’s way and the Wenger years are no longer holding back Arsenal’s manager

Replacing a legend is supposed to be hard. It took Manchester United 24 years to win the league after Matt Busby departed and it has been 11 without success since Sir Alex Ferguson left. It took Leeds 18 years to win the league again after Don Revie took the England job, although it could be argued they have never really recovered. It was 12 years after Harry Catterick left when Everton won the league again and they have not won it since Howard Kendall moved to Spain.

The shadows of Rinus Michels, Hennes Weisweiler and Brian Clough still hang over Ajax, Borussia Mönchengladbach and Nottingham Forest. Countless Dynamo Kyiv managers have found themselves asking: “What would Valeriy Lobanovskyi do?” That is always the problem. Football is constantly evolving. Managers must change. But the new manager must strike a balance.

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The regulator is coming – but is football even governable any more? | Jonathan Wilson

Modern club owners, from states to oligarchs, have the financial might to bully the body into submission

For a long time, football has heard the voice crying in the wilderness: make way for the coming of the regulator. This has been the hope that has sustained the rump of the game as the rich have disappeared further and further into the distance and clubs have been dragged further and further from their traditional communities. And now, with the launch on Thursday of the football governance bill, it feels a little realer, a little closer. This is actually happening.

But as details emerge, perhaps the most important thing to remember is that just because a regulator exists does not mean that regulations are followed, as the water industry demonstrates all too clearly. Far more important than any individual clause in the bill is what power the regulator will have in practice.

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Refereeing conspiracy theories are nonsense but stem from valid fears | Jonathan Wilson

As fans lose control of the sport and clubs they love to mega-rich owners, they turn instead on a familiar enemy: officials

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Another weekend, another slew of wearying arguments about VAR and refereeing. At Bournemouth, Arsenal fans called the referee Robert Jones “a cheat” and chanted that the Premier League was “corrupt”. On social media, the outrage was even greater. Fans have always complained about referees, of course, but traditionally they called them “blind” and dismissed them as “wankers” or “bastards”. Then came the “You’re not fit to referee” song; the cries of systemic corruption, though, are relatively new.

Perhaps this is just the world we live in, one of distortions and paranoia, shaped by a diverse range of populist cynics from José Mourinho to Donald Trump, social media nurturing conspiracy theories which sprout from the fertile ground left as Covid retreated. Or perhaps there is something more complex going on.

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition

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Liverpool pass their first big test as title contenders: Football Weekly - podcast

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and Sam Dalling as Liverpool beat Chelsea 2-1 to stay ahead of Manchester City at the top of the table

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On the podcast today: Liverpool’s first big test of the season and they pass it with a relatively scare-free 2-1 win over a much-improving Chelsea.

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Arsenal’s sloppiness calls into question whether they are serious contenders | Jonathan Wilson

Fans may feel aggrieved over perceived injustices, but reality is that title hopefuls make too many shoddy errors

This was not, for all that Arsenal fans will whine about conspiracies, about the refereeing decisions. It was not about the red card to William Saliba in the first half or about the penalty awarded in the second, profound though the impact of those decisions was. Rather it was about the extraordinary self-destructiveness that led to those decisions, the poor passes, the lack of discipline, the woolly-mindedness that so often afflicts Arsenal at key moments.

Perhaps the standards expected are unrealistic. This, after all, is a team that accrued 89 points last season – in historical terms, a huge number. In the old days, teams were allowed their slips. But that is not the modern world. When 90 points is effectively the minimum required to win the title, points cannot be given away like this if a team is to be regarded as a serious contender.

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Thomas Tuchel’s arrival highlights English football’s failure to produce top managers | Jonathan Wilson

Junior-level success cannot mask the fact that the Premier League stifles the development of home-grown coaches

The good news for the battered pride of English coaching is that, even leaving Lee Carsley and his complicated status aside, England still provides the manager for 11 national teams. Although France and Italy also supply 11, only Spain, with 14, offer more. The less positive news is that, according to the Fifa world rankings, the best of those sides are Jamaica (61st), New Zealand (95th) and Puerto Rico (154th).

It’s not to demean the work of Steve McClaren, Darren Bazeley or Charlie Trout to suggest that that does not sound like the record of a major football nation. It’s true that Spain’s tally includes the coaches of Brunei and Belize, but Spaniards also manage Portugal and, crucially, Spain. France’s list includes South Sudan and New Caledonia, but also Georgia and France. Italians manage Nepal and San Marino, but also Turkey and Italy. You don’t have to be a raging xenophobe to regard the FA’s decision to appoint Thomas Tuchel as manager of England as an admission of failure.

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How likely is it that footballers will strike over their workload? | Jonathan Wilson

In a special mailbag edition of our newsletter, Jonathan Wilson answers your questions on Mauricio Pochettino, strikes and stashing away players

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With the expanded Champions League and the planned Club World Cup next year causing a big fixture pile-up, how likely is it we will see players take action over the number of games they are being forced to play? – Oliver


It’s definitely an issue, and given how many players have talked about workload in public, you can be sure it’s something they’re discussing privately. The problem really is how action could be organised. It’s only elite players who are playing too many games; those lower down the pyramid probably wouldn’t mind a few more games for extra cash. Similarly while a lot of fans are concerned about the proliferation of games that seem to mean very little, they’d still be furious if a game for which they’ve bought a ticket and paid travel costs was called off because of an industrial dispute by players who earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a week. That’s one of the reasons football has taken the disappointing path it has; organised opposition is very difficult – the protest against the super league was one of the very few occasions on which enough of football’s different stakeholders were sufficiently in alignment to kick back.

That said, the Club World Cup would seem a decent target. The shambolic organisation means few fans are likely to have bought tickets yet and, unlike the Champions League or a World Cup, it’s not a competition players dream of playing in. In terms of the PR war, it would be very easy, at least for players at European clubs, to portray it as a needless addition imposed on the calendar with no consultation – because that’s true. I don’t expect it, but if there were to be serious action, it would make sense for players to target it at the Club World Cup.

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition

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Apocalypse now: City wrangle shows the wealthiest owners could kill football | Jonathan Wilson

Legal battle between Manchester City and the Premier League highlights the game’s existential crisis – is it too late to save it?

Don’t look up! As the families of Westeros squabble, the undead gather beyond the Wall. As senior monks jockey to be the new abbot, viking longboats mass on the horizon. As the left bicker interminably over infinitesimal doctrinal differences, right-leaning billionaire tech-bros fund the march of quasi-fascistic populism.

The problem with existential threats, from the climate crisis to Conquistadors to Covid, is that they always seem distant, somehow unreal. People are always predicting the end of the world, which makes it easy to dismiss the doom-mongers. When we’ve had so many warnings of the apocalypse, why should anybody listen now? But some day one of those prophets is going to be right. Nothing is eternal.

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Johan Neeskens deserves place next to Cruyff in Total Football pantheon | Jonathan Wilson

While Johan Cruyff is the philosophical lodestar of Dutch football, his teammate was also hugely influential

Johan Cruyff called the Netherlands’ 2-0 win over Brazil in the second group phase of the 1974 World Cup the truest example of Total Football there had been. Johan Neeskens was knocked out during it, floored by a punch from Brazil’s captain Marinho Peres. That felt typical. Neeskens was always the physical one, a hard, angular midfielder with unnervingly blue eyes. Sublimely skilled as that Dutch side were, they were also more than capable of looking after themselves and when it came to mixing it there was no one better than Neeskens.

But Neeskens also scored the Dutch opener in that game, receiving the ball halfway inside the Brazil half, pushing the ball to Cruyff on the right then continuing his run to sweep in a first-time finish. Perhaps there was an element of fortune in the loop of the ball over the goalkeeper Émerson Leão, but the key to the goal was his dart in front of Luís Pereira to meet Cruyff’s pass, the awareness of where Cruyff was going to deliver the ball, the instinct to time his movement, and then the technique to guide the ball on target. In a brilliant and brutal game, it was Neeskens, their most brutally brilliant player, who shone.

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Chaos and acrimony are more familiar to Manchester United than you may think | Jonathan Wilson

Erik ten Hag is far from alone in finding Old Trafford degenerating into a swirl of confusion around him

On Sunday, Aston Villa, fifth in the table, perhaps drained after Wednesday’s euphoric win over Bayern Munich, drew 0-0 against a lower mid-table side. Under normal circumstances that wouldn’t get the pulses racing, particularly not on a day when Brighton came from 2-0 down to beat Tottenham and Chelsea against Nottingham Forest degenerated into a 15-man melee. But this is Manchester United we’re talking about.

At some point, perhaps, the fascination will fade, but more than 11 years since Sir Alex Ferguson left, the soap opera remains as compelling as ever. How can the most successful team in English league history, the club with the highest average attendances, have got things so badly, so consistently, wrong? The basic law of football is that money rises, that the rich eventually prevail: for United to defy that basic truth for so long represents a remarkable commitment to mismanagement.

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Jonathan will answer your questions in next week’s edition: if you have a question for him, email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, or reply directly to this email, and he’ll answer the best.

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